Sex is not Assigned at Birth

Richard Dawkins writes:

The American Medical Association says that the word “sex” — as in male or female — is problematic and outdated; we should all now use the “more precise” phrase “sex assigned at birth.” The American Psychological Association concurs: Terms like “birth sex” and “natal sex” are “disparaging” and misleadingly “imply that sex is an immutable characteristic.” The American Academy of Pediatrics is on board too: “sex,” it declares, is “an assignment that is made at birth.” And now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urge us to say “assigned male/female at birth” or “designated male/female at birth” instead of “biologically male/female” or “genetically male/female.” ...

Even so, the sexual divide is an exceedingly clear binary, as binary as any distinction you can find in biology.

So where does this leave the medical associations’ claims about “sex assigned at birth”?

A baby’s name is assigned at birth; no one doubts that. But a baby’s sex is not “assigned”; it is determined at conception and is then observed at birth, first by examination of the external genital organs and then, in cases of doubt, by chromosomal analysis.

Or from a NY Times op-ed:

This matters because sex matters. Sex is a fundamental biological feature with significant consequences for our species, so there are costs to encouraging misconceptions about it.

Sex matters for health, safety and social policy and interacts in complicated ways with culture. ...

More generally, the interaction between sex and human culture is crucial to understanding psychological and physical differences between boys and girls, men and women. We cannot have such understanding unless we know what sex is, which means having the linguistic tools necessary to discuss it. ...

The problem is that “sex assigned at birth”— unlike “larger-bodied”— is very misleading. Saying that someone was “assigned female at birth” suggests that the person’s sex is at best a matter of educated guesswork. “Assigned” can connote arbitrariness — as in “assigned classroom seating” — and so “sex assigned at birth” can also suggest that there is no objective reality behind “male” and “female,” no biological categories to which the words refer.

Contrary to what we might assume, avoiding “sex” doesn’t serve the cause of inclusivity: not speaking plainly about males and females is patronizing. ...

A more radical proponent of “assigned sex” will object that the very idea of sex as a biological fact is suspect. According to this view — associated with the French philosopher Michel Foucault and, more recently, the American philosopher Judith Butler — sex is somehow a cultural production, the result of labeling babies male or female. “Sex assigned at birth” should therefore be preferred over “sex,” not because it is more polite, but because it is more accurate.

This position tacitly assumes that humans are exempt from the natural order. If only! Alas, we are animals. Sexed organisms were present on Earth at least a billion years ago, and males and females would have been around even if humans had never evolved.